Etching
Maker & role
Eirene Mort (b.1879, d.1977), Artist
Production date
1920
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Object detail
Title
Elizabeth Farm House, Parramatta
Production place
Collection
Measurements
0 - Whole, H: 50.7 x W: 40.7cm (H: 507 x W: 407mm)
Subject Place
Signature & marks
pencil markings faded 'Elizabeth Farm .... 25/50.......... Mort'
Titled below print image left: Elizabeth Farm House, Parramatta' and signed 'Eirene Mort' lower right.
Editioned state: 25/50
Titled below print image left: Elizabeth Farm House, Parramatta' and signed 'Eirene Mort' lower right.
Editioned state: 25/50
Credit line
Purchase, 1999
Elizabeth Farm Collection, Museums of History New South Wales
Elizabeth Farm Collection, Museums of History New South Wales
Caption
Elizabeth Farm House, Parramatta
Description
Printed in the 1920s, this etching by Eirene Mort (1879-1977) was copied from a photograph taken a few years earlier. The photograph, dated 1918, features the south façade of Elizabeth Farm’s ‘servants quarters’. The image also shows a cow grazing in the grassy paddock to the south, its head buried inside a thick and unkempt hedge growing over a timber post and rail fence. Within a year or two, suburban houses would be built opposite the old farm house, lining the newly created Alice Street from 1923.
Mort’s etching evokes an impression of Elizabeth Farm as a thatched and rustic Elizabethan cottage – consistent with the ideals and aesthetic interests of the Arts and Craft movement of the early 20th century. As the look of Sydney's new suburban houses was being influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement popular in USA and Britain, so too were artists and designers producing works emphasising a pre-industrial and distinctly hand-made quality. By contrast, the slightly more objective photograph shows a roof clad in corrugated tin, set flush with the stony gable. Towering above the rail fence stands a mature Japanese Pagoda Tree, or Sophora japonica. Still growing today, this tree survives from the garden of Elizabeth Macarthur.
Mort’s etching evokes an impression of Elizabeth Farm as a thatched and rustic Elizabethan cottage – consistent with the ideals and aesthetic interests of the Arts and Craft movement of the early 20th century. As the look of Sydney's new suburban houses was being influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement popular in USA and Britain, so too were artists and designers producing works emphasising a pre-industrial and distinctly hand-made quality. By contrast, the slightly more objective photograph shows a roof clad in corrugated tin, set flush with the stony gable. Towering above the rail fence stands a mature Japanese Pagoda Tree, or Sophora japonica. Still growing today, this tree survives from the garden of Elizabeth Macarthur.
Accession number
EF99/1
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